THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 19, 2015
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mother from the age of ten until she
left for college, says that, as a girl, she
used to think that her mother was crazy.
"It was only much later, when I began
to understand how unjust the position
of women was in this country, that I
knew my mother had never been 'ill,'
as the doctors claimed. It was that her
spirit had been broken. Until then, I
had always worried that I might have
inherited something---that I'd start dis-
appearing into the street in my night-
gown, the way she had."
It isn't surprising that Steinem had
what she calls "a Hollywood vision of
school." She dreamed of becoming a
dancer and maybe, eventually, a Rock-
ette. "I imagined myself, with some im-
practicality, as dancing my way out of To-
ledo," she told me. By the time she started
high school, she had mastered tap danc-
ing while twirling a baton, as well as danc-
ing down a flight of stairs, like a Busby
Berkeley showgirl, playing "Anchors
Aweigh" on ankle bells. And though she
balked at "sinking so low as to put taps
on toe shoes"---in late-forties Toledo, the
ultimate female talent test---dancing re-
mains on her list of life's fulfilling plea-
sures (along with organizing and great
sex). She has been spotted dancing in el-
evators and o ce corridors, and even, for
a few months in the nineteen-nineties,
at the old Roseland Ballroom, taking
tango lessons. "It's a sick, authoritarian
dance, but I loved it," she says.
I once asked Steinem what the real-
estate developer and publisher Mort
Zuckerman---a man I had seen, years
earlier, signalling her to light his cigar---
was doing on her otherwise egalitarian
list of former lovers, which includes,
most enduringly, Franklin Thomas, who
for seventeen years was the head of the
Ford Foundation ("the longtime love
of my life, and best friend"), along with
the great alto saxophonist and com-
poser of "Take Five," Paul Desmond
("a close friend and a short romance"),
the director Mike Nichols ("more like
three or four years of a smart date"),
the Ford Administration's Assistant At-
torney General for Civil Rights, Stan
Pottinger ("We'd been together long
enough, so we stopped the a air"), and
the Olympic decathlete and actor Rafer
Johnson, who helped tackle Sirhan Sir-
han, moments after he shot Bobby Ken-
nedy ("I have lasting respect for him").
She replied, "Well, Mort's moved to
the right now, but he was funny, and
he loved to dance."
"My father gave new meaning to
the term 'financially irrespon-
sible,' and after years of it my mom
crashed," Steinem told the actress and
director Christine Lahti one night this
summer. Lahti was debating putting
together a theatre piece based on sto-
ries about the women in her own fam-
ily, and the two friends went out to
dinner and traded reminiscences about
"the unlived lives of our moms." Once,
when Steinem was visiting, her mother
told her, "Your sister just got a fur coat
and didn't have to pay for it"---mean-
ing that her sister was married and
Steinem, who was not, had to buy her
own coats. "My mother wasn't criticiz-
ing me---she was advising me," Stei-
nem told Lahti, laughing.
The women talked for a long time
about the kind of liberation that comes
from laughing---Steinem having
watched six female comics perform at
the Gotham Comedy Club the night
before. The show was called Sisters of
Comedy, and the impresario was the
young feminist producer and writer
Agunda Okeyo, who, at the time, was
staying in Steinem's guest room. "The
power of laughter---that's power!" she
said. "It's our only free emotion, the
one that nobody can control."
"One of the hard things for me, start-
ing out as an actress, was to laugh,"
Lahti said. "To find a visual memory
or image that let me laugh." Today, it
might be the look on her father's face---
he was a surgeon, partial to the ubiq-
uitous male adage of his generation
"Why buy the whole cow if you can
get the milk free?"---if, as a teen-age
girl, she had come back with the fem-
inist retort "Why buy the whole pig
just to get one little sausage?"
Lahti married in her thirties and
has three children. Steinem married
for the first time in her mid-sixties, in-
herited three stepchildren (among them
the actor Christian Bale), and was wid-
owed three years later, when her hus-
band, David Bale, died of brain can-
cer, at the age of sixty-two. Bale was a
South African-born British business-
man and environmentalist. They met
when he walked up to her at a Los
Angeles Voters for Choice benefit. It
was a happy marriage, "a green-card
marriage, because we would have been
together anyway," Steinem told me. She
says that caring for him that last year,
when he was ill and "needed someone
to help him out of life, and I needed
someone to force me to live in the pres-
ent," had actually helped her "expiate
the pain of my old terrors"---the ter-
rors of caring for her mother when she
was too young to understand or cope.
Steinem has compared marriage to
slavery law in this country. As a young
woman, she fled one brief, ill-advised
engagement. And, in her early forties,
she amiably dissolved a second, to Rob-
ert Benton, who went on to write and
direct "Kramer vs. Kramer." "Neither
of us was really sure we wanted to marry,
so we took it in steps. The first was to
do the blood tests and get the license.
We did. The second was for him to
buy the new suit. He did. The third
was for me to buy the dress. I never
got to the dress, I just couldn't do it,
and the marriage license expired."
Four years after David Bale died, a
reporter from Pakistan asked Steinem
why she had changed her mind about
marriage. "I didn't change," she told
him. "Marriage changed. We spent
thirty years in the United States chang-
ing the marriage laws. If I had mar-
ried when I was supposed to get mar-
ried, I would have lost my name, my
legal residence, my credit rating, many
of my civil rights. That's not true any-
more. It's possible to make an equal
marriage."
Steinem's archives are at Smith. She
is devoted to the college, which
was founded, in the eighteen-seven-
ties, with an endowment from Sophia
Smith, a Massachusetts woman with
a family fortune at her disposal and a
strong desire to provide young women
with what she described in her will as
the "means and facilities" for higher
education equal to any available to
young men. In Steinem's senior year,
Chester Bowles, who would shortly be
named Ambassador to India, came to
speak. He was so taken by the stu-
dents' response that he donated his lec-
ture fee of two thousand dollars---se-
rious money, in those days, when a
year's room, board, and tuition at Smith